


A Hundred Definitions for the Same Thing

by pollinia



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-13
Updated: 2010-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-11 18:23:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollinia/pseuds/pollinia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The greatest man Doctor Shamal ever met claimed to have bedded nearly four thousand women in Italy alone, from the southern-most tip of Sicily to the highest reaches of the Lombardi province.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Hundred Definitions for the Same Thing

__

Your broken heart beating you ran to the doctor,  
making believe you had swallowed the sun.  
-"Doctors of Deliverance"

 

The greatest man Doctor Shamal has ever met claimed to have bedded nearly four thousand women in Italy alone, from the southern-most tip of Sicily to the highest reaches of the Lombardi province.

Shamal had apprenticed under Don Gaccio as a young boy, starting with the most basic of classical genetics. He drew his first Punnett square at the age of seven. By the time he was ten, he worked in the Don's special breeding program for poisonous frogs. Soon, he was proposing experiments of his own, typed on an old, noisy typewriter as required by his mentor.

Don Gaccio said once, over an expensive bottle of wine, the fine silver line of his moustache quirking up at one corner, that he had sincerely loved each and every one of these goddesses he had taken into his bed. He called these women ethereal beings, mystics who offered to him their bounty of pleasure and love.

By the time Shamal was sixteen, he was wooing women with his mentor's own time-honored methods. He kissed Carmella de Luca in the Don's botanical garden. He gave her a cutting of a calla lily.

 

***

 

There's something to be said for a knowledge of science, when it comes to being an assassin.

Shamal learns this when the first mafia Families come courting, greedy hands held out in offering: money, things, women. All of it at their disposal and, thus, his, and it's hard to turn down such offers. _("Don't confuse," Don Gaccio said, "the love of these women with real love. There's loving as if it is a duty; then there's loving because it's unstoppable.")_

But it's a tall request. Shamal shifts from Family to Family for a short time, an independent contractor, and then there's medical school and he settles down for a while as he finishes his studies. After that, it's back to the familiar territory of darkened warehouses, back alleys, and balconies shrouded in shadow.

Then, a short time later, he's laid up with an injury for an indeterminant amount of time after another job for the first Family for whom he kills people as a living. He lies bleeding on the ground beside the dead body of his target, another successful mission. He laughs to himself as he thinks about the reverse applicability of his medical training. But an assassin is no good when he's got a broken leg, when he's lost enough blood from a head wound to knock him out cold, and a man has to make his money somehow.

Funny, he thinks, that someone would find his academic background more desirable than his experiential one, but it doesn't matter to him. He takes the first job offered him, an in-house position as a Family doctor. Healer to the rich and ruthless. And there, Doctor Shamal would meet a small boy who looked at him first like an enemy, and then like a father.

The job pays well; it requires he train his fingers for work finer than the squeeze of trigger. It also requires that he keep many secrets locked up inside his chest, and so he does. A steady stream of men flow into his examination room. Bullet wounds and knife wounds and poisoned stomachs and crashes made beautiful with expensive cars. He treats them all, eyes trained on the wound and only the wound, never really taking in the man before him, the man or the story. Once, he stitches up a deep gash running across three protruding ribs, and a man with a sneering mouth spits at him, delirious with pain. The doctor wipes off his face and swears to treat only women in the future.

This doesn't stop his employer's boy from showing up anyway. The doctor catches him sometimes, peering into the windows, his tiny face held up by a straining neck. Then he darts away once he knows he's caught. It quickly becomes somethingl like a game, one that the doctor will grudgingly admit to enjoying. Once, Shamal hears him curse. He catches Gokudera by the elbow. "Wash your mouth out," he says, "or don't come back here again."

At first, he administers his advice with the innocence of a young man. It comes as a mixture of two things. First, knowing that he will likely never have children of his own, and second, the hubris of all childless men: knowing he can do it better.

First Gokudera says he wants to be a doctor. He spends three weeks sticking bandages to the torn edges of his favorite blanket. Then, when Gokudera--four years old and observant--sees Doctor Shamal training out in the field, sweaty and feral and tossing bomb after knife after deadly insect, he says he wants to be an assassin too.

So the doctor hands him a stick of dynamite. It's small enough for the boy to fit in his hands. It's not sharp like a blade, and no one wants to see the kid put his eye out. Doctor Shamal congratulates himself on this sophisticated, inspired choice.

Thirteen years later and now Gokudera's in his office, blowing up another bomb: a bigger one, concealed and unexpected, nuclear, devastating.

"Yeah," he says, those strange-colored brows pinched together on his forehead, "I'm a fag. And I don't see any other patients here--are you going to see me or not?"

 

***

 

"Look, kid," Doctor Shamal says, putting on his most incredulous face, "this isn't exactly my area of expertise and I should never have opened the door for you. Don't you kids have the internet for this kind of thing?"

Gokudera scoffs. "I don't need _technique_ advice, old man."

And Doctor Shamal looks at Gokudera for the first time since he'd walked into the office without knocking. The kid's got that embarrassed look on his face, eyes averted, cheeks pink like when he'd show up as a boy, pretending to have a cold but really only wanting to talk. _Make me another paper plane, old man_.

"You really need to start making some friends your own age, Hayato."

 

***

 

One word from Gokudera is like a juicy tell-all, if you knew how to mine it, like the kind of rag Shamal might pick up before a long flight if no one was looking and the cashier was cute. It's amazing, really, if he took the time to think about it. What would be small, throw-away conversation with anyone else is the opening of Gokudera's soul, his chest of secrets, so when Shamal asks, "So, you've done it, right?" and Gokudera answers with a scoff, a blush, and an acidic, "I'm not like you, old man," it is exactly what it is.

 

***

 

If there's one thing Doctor Shamal knows, it is that if you are going to inhabit a space, then you inhabit it.

A woman named Gloria told him this once, lifting his coffee cup to her lips in the morning. He worked with her on a job once, back before medical school. She wrapped the curves of her body in the neat uniform of a waitress as she sighted in on a target; afterward, she necked with Shamal in the company car. She made breakfast in his kitchen, washed the dishes, hung her coat on his rack.

In a cooing voice he had teased her for her comfort in his flat, the way her small frame filled it from corner to corner. _What is the ground here for_ , she had asked, _if not to hold me up?_

But Gokudera sits with his suit jacket in his hands when he comes in. The kid is as expansive as oxygen, as smoke or flames, when he is a Right-Hand Man, but he becomes this narrow slip of a human when he tells the Doctor about his love life--his lust life, his youthful indiscretions, whatever he would choose to call them.

Shamal wants to tell Gokudera, if you're not afraid to do something, then don't be afraid to talk about it. Alternately, don't do anything you would be afraid to talk about.

Shamal thumbs through his mental file of secrets and lies, thinks himself a hypocrite and then a philanthropist, in rapid succession.

Then cyclically.

 

***

 

It started genuinely enough with a scraped knee or a fever or, more often than not, the boy's psychotic sister. Gokudera would drag himself into the infirmary of his father's vast mansion, demanding treatment, looking as earnestly miserable as any bullet-riddled mafioso. Usually, the doctor would roll his eyes and jut his chin in the direction of the gauze or the painkillers. He supposed, if he really loved his work, he would be eager to stitch up any wound, to heal any hurt.

As it was, he could only watch as Gokudera scraped a step stool across the floor and used it to climb onto a counter, into a cupboard.

But in a short amount of time, it morphed into desperate hypochondria. Claims of stomach cancer, the imagined swallowing of a poisonous spider. Often, Bianchi, even when she was out shopping with her mother, far away from Gokudera's most acute symptoms.

Now, staring at Gokudera--nearly full grown, dark suit even as his friends move through their lives in T-shirts and jeans, arms crossed over his chest in that apathetic, surly way even now--Shamal had the most distinct of revelations that he should have put a stop to this back when the kid was eight.

 

***

 

These visits quickly become routine. On Tuesdays, after Gokudera's midday thermodynamics course at the university, he stops by Shamal's office. Shamal has resigned himself to blocking out an hour of his time as if he were meeting with a patient, and, in some ways, he really is.

Gokudera sits on the examination table, leaning back on his hands, cigarette fuming away between his lips. Shamal knows he should tell him to stop. He knows, but he doesn't do it. Sometimes he lights up too.

Mostly, they just sit there, smoking away, not saying much of anything for a long while. Gokudera will eventually talk about what he's got going on in the lab at school, projects for the Family masquerading under the guise of "homework," or "independent study." But he blows his professors' minds; he opens their eyes to new ways of thinking about old concepts. He can do nearly anything he wants. University is different from high school for Gokudera. In university, Gokudera thrives.

Eventually, ten minutes before his hour is up, he will crack open the chest on what it is he came for. He'll say, _We hung out at my place last night._ Or, _He wants to see the fireworks with me but that would only impose on the Tenth._

He says, _This is so stupid. It's so stupid._

 

***

 

The first time, Gokudera says, he wasn't really sure what was going to happen. He'd felt good, very good, but when the person he was with moved his hands from Gokudera's shoulders down to his hips, Gokudera had first felt the tight fist of anxiety grip around his chest, and then the sensation that it was all too much, all too soon. He says he barely had time to make it to the bathroom before succumbing to the hammering heart and quickened breath of a panic attack. Or maybe it was an orgasm. He wasn't sure. He blamed sudden, inconvenient illness and made his friend leave.

The doctor thinks he needs to sit down; he thinks maybe he needs a drink.

But he listens on, a prisoner in his own office; his own territory, and he is a cornered animal. Gokudera doesn't name names. He doesn't drop hints and if Shamal needs to salvage some pride in his surrogate son at this moment, he supposes that small detail will suffice. Still, he tries to convince himself that this partner of Gokudera's is just a random person met in a random pub, or maybe in some dusty, obscure bookshop. Maybe it's a low-ranking member of an allied Family.

But then he sees the Vongola ring on Gokudera's finger--heavy and the entire world--and he knows that any such searches are exercises in futility.

It's not that the doctor is against such intra-Family relations. He has spied the beautiful women of many an organization and, even had he not been an independent contractor, he would have still wooed them, would have worshiped them. It is said that Chrome Dokuro and the Vongola Cloud liaison occasionally, even when not brought into congress by shared rifle scopes.

It's just, the fact of a narrowed field makes it much easier for the doctor to begin narrowing it even further. He ticks off the taken and the incompatible. He weighs the importance of shared interests, or perhaps the enrichment of differences. He sighs.

"It's not the Sawada kid, is it?"

Gokudera's face twists up into something horrified and aghast. "You take that back," he says, " _you take that back right now._ "

 

***

 

 _Don't use that word_ , Gokudera says, _how am I supposed to_ love _a person, when people are so unreliable? So unpredictable?_

 

***

 

Once, Gokudera drags in, bloodied and tattered. "Skipped class," he says, and he makes his way back to the cabinet where Doctor Shamal keeps the antiseptic, the bandages. Not once in thirteen years has he patched Gokudera up. He won't start now.

It's a strange show, this man whom self-suffiency has made. The doctor remembers back, watching the grown-up Gokudera in his office dissolve away to the boy of so long ago. He remembers the early, aimless rebellions, the fear in his father's eyes, in his sister's, when Gokudera disappeared. Shamal had been dispatched, despite all protests that he was most definitely not a babysitter, to follow him. At the very least, he was to keep tabs, to keep an eye open. "He only speaks to you," Gokudera's father had said.

In Romania, as he watched the boy steal apples from an unguarded street cart, Shamal missed the recruitment call from the Varia. The Varia doesn't call twice. That night, in frustration he lit up the skyline with cheap dynamite pieced together from scrounged, makeshift materials while Gokudera slept under the stone archway of a door. The child missed every shuddering blast.

 

***

 

The second time, Gokudera tells him, they make it to the bed, mostly undressed. His clothes left in a trail of depravity from the front door of Gokudera's apartment through the living room and finally the heavy drop of pants, belts, at the foot of his bed. This time, his pants are spared soiling, but the expanse of sheet between the other boy's boy-knees, on the other hand, is not.

Shamal has slept in that bed on the occasion that he has shown up in Japan unannounced and needed a room. He thinks he'll take a seedy hotel next time.

His partner, Gokudera says, didn't ridicule him or get angry. Instead, he says, they just continued on as if nothing had happened. The doctor tries to picture this, the kissing, the touching, the cloistered shell in which Gokudera allows himself to be comfortable and loved. He wonders what it looks like, this thing, Gokudera letting his guard down enough to be embarrassed and to follow it up with something tender and full of hands, full of mouths. He wonders about this partner, generous and accepting, and what it's like to build an intimacy which welcomes humiliation with open arms and a gentle smile.

There was that time in Amsterdam, a woman named Marta, and too much wine and other indulgences. A neat, narrow bed in an upstairs apartment overlooking the street below where voices mingled and swam, and Shamal looking dejected and embarrassed, sitting on the edge of the mattress. Marta curled in on her slim body as she smoked in the corner, muttering with her crisp, acerbic tones, _You Italian men, you Italian men._

He wonders if he would trade it for understanding caresses. He wonders if he would trade it for anything.

 

***

 

"It keeps happening, Hayato," the doctor says, "because you're waiting too long. Man up. Stop analyzing this like it's some kind of enemy security system for Christ's sake."

 

***

 

Through a long shared history, Doctor Shamal has learned a few things about Gokudera. One of these things is, he is a kid with a lot of shame, but none of it is directed at his body.

To be sure, it is a decent body, if the doctor were to look at it objectively, though a little bony, a little sharp-angled. But the women don't seem to mind. The doctor sees them at meetings, the way their eyes move like hands over the planes and hollows of it, accentuated by exquisite black suits tailored to perfection. Hungrily, they eye his ever-growing collection of silver studs, a single heavy cuff on the left ear. They brew up precognitions, Shamal can tell, of the tattoos hidden beneath expensive fabrics, though they cannot see them.

Of course, he's pretty sure Gokudera has never once thought of his body as attractive or unattractive, desirable or undesirable. At best, he's evaluated its efficiency or its adequacy in a sense related to his Family, his Boss.

And it's a shame, this wasted body, because right now Gokudera is sitting in Doctor Shamal's office, telling him about his recent near-sexual exploits and it is becoming increasingly likely that he will never use that body to bring pleasure to a woman. That he will never allow a beautiful woman to appreciate it, to make him feel validated in the way that only beautiful women can do.

Gokudera speaks with such candidness about the situation, though always sparsely. Shamal is surprised by this discovery, but supposes he shouldn't be. If Gokudera is going to claim ownership of anything, then he truly owns it. For the last three years he has unabashedly and ceaselessly declared himself the right-hand man of a boy who didn't want to be a boss. No timidity keeps him from claiming his position and fighting for it. It would only make sense that he would come into sexuality like a neon sign glaring away red and constant into the night.

 

***

 

And after a while it's, "Really, Hayato, do it or don't. I'm beginning to think you only come here for the attention. Is this because Bianchi threatened to poison your imaginary friend when you were a kid? Is that what's going on here?"

Gokudera tries to look as thorny as possible. "What's the rush," he asks. Then, a bit more reflectively, "It's complicated."

 

***

 

The sun has long gone down outside his office window. By this point in the evening, all of the prettiest women will have left the bars and shops. The doctor sighs into the air-conditioned space between him and Gokudera.

"No, no, I get it," Shamal says, pinching the space between his eyebrows, "this is part of your narrative of tragedy. Oh, woe is Hayato, his love is so doomed and destructive. I get it."

Gokudera narrows his eyes and settles back against the counter. "I told you I don't love him," he says, sharp and quick as a burn.

"Whatever. Look, do you at least _like_ this kid?"

Gokudera only shrugs, but Shamal knows what that means. He read the key to Gokudera over a decade ago.

"And do you like carrying on this abomination with him?"

"Would I do it if I hated it?"

"You tell me, Hayato. All I know is, if you like him and you enjoy doing whatever it is you do with him, then what's the big deal? Who cares if you love him. The world is not going to end if you loosen up for once and have fun doing something besides getting yourself blown up in the name of your little man-crush on the Vongola Tenth."

The sense of joy Shamal has gleaned from watching Gokudera bristle and flail has never quite decreased. He looks like such a boy, stomping around in that ridiculous man's body of his, all long-legged and strong, his face moulded into the shape of teen angst. _Don't talk about the Tenth that way_ this, _don't you know how to shut up_ that. It was like watching him as a five-year-old boy again, short fuse always lit and hissing away. It was almost precious, if such a word could ever be warped and bent to apply to a man like Gokudera.

 

***

 

At seven, Gokudera stood at Shamal's side as the doctor unearthed bits of shrapnel and bone from the leg of his father's Right-Hand Man. He passed Shamal antiseptic, bandages, damp rags.

 

***

 

And in between it all, there's some minor scuffle with the Cappa Santa Family. Reinforcements are necessary, and Bianchi comes to pick him up and bring him to the fray. Her long body leans against his office door. Her mouth is a drawn hangman's noose as she says, _Come on already, old man,_ and he tries not to think of how much she sounds like her brother, how much she looks like him, a small knife strapped up high on her thigh where Gokudera would keep his dynamite. The vial of arsenic tight against her breast, beneath her snug shirt, just atop her heart, where Gokudera hides away a small silver cross.

It's a disaster for both sides, bloodshed, botched execution of poorly thought-out plans, and Doctor Shamal finds himself on the ground, bloodied and his brain fluttering in between consciousness and sleep, and then there's Gokudera over him, hands as cold as ever holding the blood in, holding it all together, barking to his comrades, _Don't fuck this up, don't fuck this up or I'll fucking kill you._

When the doctor passes out, he dreams of beautiful women, the Sicilian seaside, eating grape leaves out of Ottavia Rossi's hand, the "No Vacancy" sign in the window of the hotel flickering and flashing.

 

***

 

The doctor takes the last slow drag from his cigarette, Gokudera's brand, borrowed off of him like all the others. He stubs it out in the ashtray on his knee.

"Lunch for a week if he doesn't exist," he says and watches Gokudera blanch.

The doctor prepares to eat; he prepares to eat well.

 

***

 

Gokudera is, the Doctor realizes on the last Tuesday, the patron saint of broken things. The disassembled components of an explosive, the debris after it detonates. His mother's body at the bottom of a cliff; his father's always-weak, now-crumbling mafia empire; the love his sister holds out to him with open hands, a busted toy she would fix for him if he would only ask. His own trunk of secrets and philosophies, half-truths and an identity like religion, folded away.

And here he comes, a gentle knock on the door this time instead of just barging in. His hands are only barely unsteady as they guide the wheelchair into the Doctor's office. The wheels clink with soft metal sounds. Somehow, it seems, Gokudera knows more about healing than most.

Once, there was a nurse in a hospital in the countryside. A kamikaze mission into the heart of enemy territory, but Doctor Shamal had always been a step further away from the gates of Hell than most other men. He'd lived, the cracked ribs, the concussion all part of the plan from the beginning. The nurse had worn a nametag on her uniform, but he'd never had a chance to read it; his eyes were too swollen shut. She had tended to him for a week, brought him painkillers, meals, the soft sweet breath of one-way conversation. He never once tried to touch her, though her hands on his skin were soon familiar enough. When his eyes opened, she was gone. Transferred to another ward. His roommates couldn't remember if her name was Fiorentina or something more common, something less noticable.

For the next awkward fifteen minutes, the Doctor pushes aside his own oath regarding who he treats and who he doesn't, what is below him and what is above, what made him become a doctor and what did not. For the next awkward fifteen minutes, he performs a cursory check-up on the Vongola's Rain Guardian. The boy has his own doctors, he knows, has had them for two years now; the Vongola medical team is formidable and competent. And Doctor Shamal has always been a better assassin than he's been a doctor anyway.

Shamal's eyes only stray once to the way Gokudera's hands rest, nervous and tense, on the other boy's shoulders. He tries not to wonder if, with the chair, with the injuries now old, if sex is even a possibility.

And through it all, Gokudera's mouth is smug and arrogant; almost triumphant, but for the wrong thing. Always for the wrong thing.

 _Lunch is on you,_ he mouths.

 

***

 

Don Gaccio said, _The most beautiful things are transient, fleeting._ He sipped fine wine, slipped olives between his lips. _Take the seasons. Take youth._

 

***

 

At the beginning, swallowing his shock, the doctor tells Gokudera, "Love is sudden and transformative. If you let it sit too long, it turns to vinegar. Don't be such a coward--just go for it."

And, later, it's Gokudera who does the talking. Suddenly he is this boy or he is this man, or maybe he is finding the surface somewhere in the turbulent waters in between. And he is asking the doctor, _Do you even know what you mean when you say that word?_

And if the doctor had to define it now, it would be in a voice less certain than before. If he had to answer, he might say it's about fluidity. It's about melting and flowing from one thing and into another.

It is loving Sister Delfina who was never anything like a nun, not even when she told him, _you are a good man_ , as she slipped the wallet from his pants, kissing him on the corner of his mouth before she disappears from his window. _You are a good man._

It is loving Moire who opens her door once a year when Shamal passes through her part of France, road-weary and alone.

It is loving Angelina in that tavern in Turin, the drink she spilled in anger onto his lap; it is Angelina because in that moment he had wanted nothing more than he had wanted to hold her until morning.

It is all of these things as much as it is Gokudera curled warmly around the body in his bed which is there for him and him alone.

Soon, Gokudera will say, _It's right._ He will say, _The time is right._ The doctor knows it.

And while he may not understand why it is taking Gokudera so long to arrive at the same destination which Shamal can approach with merely a single glass of fine wine and the swift bloom of another sincere, fleeting love, he remains confident that this is further proof of his belief that one simply knows.

That love is intangible and elusive when you don't have it, but concrete and unmistakable when holding it in your hands.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Oh Shit Santa community on Livejournal for the summer challenge, themed "Big Love." Nothing is bigger love than Dr. Shamal, I think.


End file.
